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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I choose a language that is as ergonomic as possible, but as performant as necessary. If e.g. Kotlin is fine, there is no way I will choose Rust.

Many projects are written in Rust that would absolutely be fine in Go, Swift or a JVM language. And I don't understand: it is nicer to write in those other languages, why choose Rust?

On the other hand, Rust is a lot nicer than C/C++, so I see it as a valid alternative there: I'm a lot happier having to make the borrow-checker happy than tracking tricky memory errors in C.

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Personally I like my programs to be as performant as is reasonable, not just as is necessary. Rust's low-cost abstractions strike the right balance for me where I feel like I'm getting pretty solid ergonomics (most of the time) while also enjoying near-peak performance as the default.

> It is nicer to write in those other languages, why choose Rust?

Honestly I don't think it is nicer to write in those other languages you mention. I might still prefer Rust if performance was removed from the equation entirely. That is just to say I think preference and experience matters just as much, if not more, than the language's memory model.

For a sufficiently large program, i am faster at writing a correct rust implementation than I am with Go. I find myself a lot more able to reason about the program thanks to the work the compiler makes me do upfront.

> it is nicer to write in those other languages

I think this is a matter of preference. Nowadays I cannot stand environments like Java (or especially Kotlin). "Tricky memory errors" is in my opinion nicer than a borrow-checker refusing sound code. I guess I really hate 'magic'...

I mostly agree with you, but ironically the article's own conclusion answers this: the language's general ethos is designed for correctness-oriented programming in the large, and this gives rise to lots of other features that garbage-collected languages could adopt but mostly don't. Like, it's way harder to avoid runtime panics in Go. (Swift does okay but people don't have faith that its custodians will do an adequate job of prioritizing the needs of developers using it for anything other than client-side apps on Apple platforms, and also it's slightly too low-level in that it doesn't have a tracing garbage collector either.)

I find Rust quite ergonomic in most cases. Yes there is more code, but in terms of thinking about it, it's usually "I have this and I want that", and the middle almost fills itself out.

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